Popular Culture in the 20th Century: Paul Whiteman and His Band

4 Paul Whiteman and His Band

The polyglot character of the population of New York State is not a recent development. Their love of music, reflected in the spread of choral groups, orchestras, and bands, has favorably affected the development of music, both vocal and instrumental.

A boom in social dancing began during the second decade of the twentieth century, along with the first recognition of music called jazz. Nat Shapiro quotes Variety as estimating that in the mid-1920s there were 60,000 dance bands playing on the dance floors of jazz age America. Beginning in 1920, radio broadcasting brought recorded and live music into homes, posing an economic challenge to pianos and combining with the Depression in 1929 to decimate record and phonograph sales. The music that America absorbed through these media came mostly from New York, from Tin Pan Alley publishing houses and from the flourishing Broadway stage, reproduced also in vaudeville houses across the country. When in the middle of the 1920s recording engineers developed microphones to replace recording horns, a new softer "crooning" performance became possible and stylish on records and over the radio.

On 9 August 1920 in a New Jersey recording studio, Paul Whiteman, a symphony orchester musician-turned-dance-band leader from Denver, Colorado, made the first of several attempts to record same newly-minted Tin Pan Alley tunes. Paul Whiteman was an ultramodernist in his day. When the war ended, the entertainment industry responded to the ready money of a new public, more urbanized, but less in touch with Broadway sophistication, and with expanding young families preparing to be the next generation of popular music consumers.

The band's first record (Whispering / Japanese Sandinan), released four months later, rapidly sold two million copies, emphasizing the ascendancy now enjoyed by records over sheet music, and propelling the portly figure of Paul Whiteman to fame and fortune, and to leadership of a new musical dynasty as King of Jazz.

In the judgment of posterity he was an imposter; the true royal blood flowed in darker veins. But Whiteman' s bland music, with its careful orchestration and its occasional "hot" moments, was real jazz to a large proportion of its listeners who had never been exposed to black music in undiluted form.

Whiteman himself was more opportunist than rebel. He had grown, he said, "listless, dissatisfied, despondent" with the life of a classical musician and had seen the chance of greater rewards in popular culture. The music of which he was a leading exponent was in fact to become the focus of a collision between the old standards of behavior and the new. The attention that jazz has demanded has occasioned the first widespread, serious critical attention to the popular arts in general.

As the war overtook the United States, a significant economic struggle surfaced in musical entertainment. In the 1920s appropriation and assirnilation of black culture continued; the blandness of Whiteman's music seemed more comfortable, staking out a neutral ground amid the furore. We have seen Whiteman deliver the music of his day from the ignominious rôle of obsequious hanger-on of the fashionable world and make it a universal thing.

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